2019: May 19th - Perry Blackshear's The Rusalka

Earlier today I found myself scouring Nathan Ballingrud's Twitter feed for a drawing a fan drawing he had posted earlier in the month. To say Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell is blowing me away is an understatement; comparisons to Clive Barker's early work are definitely warranted, but Ballingrud has his own style and it's one I love. The Barker comparison, to me, is most earned by way of both author's love of desecrating flesh. I remembered seeing Mr. Ballingrud post this piece of fan art - a drawing of one of the Black Iron Monks from collection's opening story The Atlas of Hell. While searching for the drawing, I found Mr. Ballingrud had posted the teaser for the new film by Perry Blackshear, director of 2015's They Look Like People. Apparently The Rusalka has been re-titled The Siren. Either way, this teaser is creepy as all hell - primarily due to the sound, which is always a huge sell for me - and I can't wait to see this one.

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Playlist from 5/18:

Big Business - Here Come the Waterworks
Helms Alee - Sleepwalking Sailors
Anthrax - Persistence of Time
The Beatles - Abbey Road

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No card again today. This is a short one, banged out at the start of a solitary hour I've stolen to try and finish the story I began in Spokane, and which, despite the cards telling me to let it rest, won't leave me be.

2019: May 18th - New Mike Patton Project!

Many thanks to Mr. Brown for alerting me to this new Mike Patton project, a collaboration with historic Serge Gainsbourg collaborator Jeanne Claude-Vannier. You can pre-order the album from Ipecac Records HERE; Corpse Flower is scheduled to drop September 13th.


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I finished Alan Campbell's The Art of Hunting this morning, and now I must HOWL at the fact that there is a third book completed and TOR baulked at publishing it! WTF! Mr. Campbell doesn't have very much of an internet presence to speak of - can't blame anyone on that philosophy - so, although two or three years ago there was an update on the possibility of him releasing the book digitally, there's been nothing since. Please! I need to read the third book NOW!

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Lacking a third volume of Campbell's Gravedigger Chronicles, I've moved into one of my two most anticipated books of the year: Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell. This is the collection that re-publishes Mr. Ballingrud's masterpiece of short, Weird fiction The Visible Filth that I have expounded on often in these pages since I discovered it in late 2015, and adds to it five other short stories that, if the first one is any indication - and I'm sure it is - are brilliant! Such a great time for lover's of dark fiction!

Wounds comes to us just slightly ahead of the first cinematic adaptation of Ballingrud's work, director  Babak Anvari's take on The Visible Filth, also titled Wounds. I believe the arrival of this one-two punch will be the opening salvo on the establishment of Ballingrud as a major force in the modern Horror Lexicon. And that makes me incredibly happy.

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Playlist from 5/16:

The Cure - Disintegration
Blackwater Holylight - Eponymous
Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Bauhaus - In the Flat Fields
Clint Mansell - Out of Blue OST
Blut Aus Nord - 777 Sect(s)
Melvins - Houdini
Helms Alee - Sleepwalking Sailors
Helms Alee - Noctiluca

Playlist from 5/17:

The Cure - Disintegration
Opeth - Blackwater Park
Beach House - 7
Lustmord - Songs of Gods and Demons
Melvins - Houdini
Melvins - (A) Senile Animal
Big Business - Here Come the Waterworks
Big Business - The Beast You Are

No card today.

2019: May 16th - Blackwater Holylight

One of the bands that Jonathan Grimm turned me onto during his visit last month is Blackwater Holylight. I dug their sound the moment I heard it, but didn't get back around to giving them my full attention until yesterday, when I listened to BWHL's 2018 self-titled album about six times in a row. Fantastic record, kind of sounds like the mythical place where Black Rebel Motorcycle Club meets the Doom scene, if the ladies from Veruca Salt were on back-up vocals. This is one of those every-song-is-great records, so when you have a moment, check it out.

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Gideon falls continues to blow my freakin' mind every month. I had not anticipated the scope of this book to incorporate anything that happened in this week's issue 13, least of all that the promise made by the cover would bear fruit. Subtle shades of Victoriana (it's not ostentation enough for me to call it full-on Steam Punk, but it has a hint of that delicious flavor, a flavor like most, best used sparingly):

Playlist from 5/15:

Godflesh - Streetcleaner
Faith No More - King for a Day
Beastmilk - Climax
Beastmilk - Use Your Deluge
Grave Pleasures - Dreamcrash
Blackwater Holylight - Eponymous
Atrium Carceri - Cellblock
Tennis System - Pain EP
Misfits - Earth A.D.
Uniform & The Body - Mental Wounds Not Healing
Somnium Nox - Apocrypha - EP

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Card of the day:

Again. Hmm.. So what am I missing?

2019: May 15th Godflesh - Regal

To continue the 'unsung' string I began the other day by posting FNM's Ugly in the Morning, I thought I'd start today with a track from Godflesh's 2001 final album (at the time) Hymns. I love this entire album; some purists disregard later Godflesh for the way Justin K. Broadrick begins to segue into the more ambient, pastoral sound of Jesu. For me, my love of Godflesh isn't about one album or another, but the overall arc. Which, by the way, continues to this day in fine form. Anyway, a great track from an outstanding album.

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NCBD is a light one. Good deal; saves me some money and drops the latest issue of one of my favorite books in my hands. Win win.

Man, look at that cover! Gorgeous!

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Playlist from Tuesday, 5/14:

Godflesh - Hymns
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - Vol. 1
Blut Aus Nord - Odinist: The Destruction of Reason By Illumination
Blut Aus Nord - MoRT
Blut Aus Nord - 777 Sect(s)
Blut Aus Nord - 777 The Desanctification
Fenn - Dustwalker
Blut Aus Nord - The Work Which Transforms God
Jed Kurzel - The Babadook OST

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Card of the day:

Okay, full disclosure: if you go back a few months, I pulled this card. I'd left it in the deck on purpose, thinking I may find a way to interpret it into my overall, personal theory of reading this deck as a singular quanta of information, instead of as a collection of individual cards. Does that make sense? Maybe not. This is kind of free-form, impromptu logic, but isn't that what Tarot and Divination supposed to be at least partially about? What good is it to memorize 'readings' and definitions for objects that are supposed to represent aspects of our collective and individual unconscious? Anyway, after the first time I pulled this card and logged it here, I didn't draw it again until recently. But now, I've pulled it three times in the last two weeks, and although I'd kind of reversed on logging it here until now, with this new draw, I feel I have to look deeper (I say that sometimes and then don't have time to do it). To begin with, I pulled two more cards after, to try and clarify:

Okay, so it's going to take all - or at least a lot - of my Will to discover something that has been occulted to me. After some digging, it looks as though I will be beginning HERE and, perhaps more interestingly, HERE.

2019: May 14th - Faith No More Live 1997

I've had FNM on the brain of late, specifically King for a Day. Ugly in the Morning has always seemed a classic to me - well, every track on King is a classic, in my opinion at least - but it remains a bit unsung in my head, as in it's never a song I think or discuss first when talking about the band or the album. Contemplating this lead to the idea to post, and searching for the song on youtube this live version came up. Really cool to see this live from back in the day. There are currently conflicting reports of the band working on new music; Patton says they're not and the rest of the guys say they are, so who knows what may one day come down the pipes, if anything. I've recently begun to wonder if we might not see FNM with a different singer again at some point, or new band altogether, comprised of Bottom and Gould, at the very least.

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Playlist from 5/13:

Godflesh - Pure
Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music
ACDC - Highway to Hell
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats - The Night Creeper
Charles Bernstein - A Nightmare on Elm Street OST
Blut Aus Nord - The Odinist

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Card of the day:

The marriage of two forces/ideas into one. I'll read this as a pat on the back for continuing to develop the different voice and ideas I'm applying to writing Ciazarn, which is wholly outside my comfort zone.

2019: Soviet Soviet Live on KEXP

Soviet Soviet performing Fairy Tale, the lead track from their 2016 album Endless, live on KEXP!

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Congratulations to all my HWA brothers and sisters who won awards last night at the Bram Stoker Awards! Mike Glyer has a list of the winners up on HERE, on his Fanlight Zone website. Check it out!

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Kind of addicted to the A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night OST. I'd never seen the film before; despite countless recommendations it seemed to remain perpetually on the list. That changed this past Friday when Joe Bob Briggs showed it on The Last Drive-In. LOVED it. Loved it so much, but I need to have an immersive viewing, one without JBB's wonderful sidebars, which I love and can help ease the way for a movie like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but which impede the full effect of something like Ana Lily Amirpour's B&W, Arthouse Vampire masterpiece.



Also, the OST is chock full of unbelievable music, pretty much all from artists I am - for the moment - unfamiliar with. Lots of new music heading my way, which always makes me happy!

Playlist from 5/11:

Faith No More - King for a Day
Various Artists - A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night OST
Prince - Sign O' The Times
Lovett - The Wind OST


Playlist from 5/12:

Faith No More - King for a Day
L7 - Scatter the Rats
Blut Aus Nord - What Once Was
Godflesh - Pure

Card of the day:

The Fiery aspect of Fire - Pure Will. Which is what I will need to get through the day, I think. Long work weekend, followed by a rough Monday morning so far. I'll do what I always do - put my head down and charge through, stealing any moments I have along the way to work on Ciazarn, a growing obsession now that I've found the voice for it.

2019: May 11th Lovett - Demons of the Prairie

Yesterday I gushed for Emma Tammi's The Wind, today I'll gush for the score. I didn't know anything about Lovett, AKA Ben Lovett, but he's done quite a few scores, especially of late. You might know his music from The Ritual, The Wind, or I Trapped the Devil (which is one of the next movies on my to-watch list). The cool thing with this score though, is I've been working on this Ciazarn book with Jonathan Grimm, and I have a ton of research hours put in, an outline for the first issue/chapter, but I've been unable to find the voice for the actual prose. And a large part of the reason for that is I didn't have the right musical soundtrack to write it to. Music is essential to my writing process, and most of what I listen to evokes my usual tone, where let's say the stuff in A Collection of Desires is a nine on the darkness meter and Shadow Play is a four, and all of it is modern. Ciazarn is a completely different animal. It's 1930s Dustbowl, and it's dark, but it's told through the eyes of a ten-year-old, so that makes it less dark at times than most of my characters, and more dark other times, the hard part being able to tell where each is appropriate for the sake of the story. Anyway, with Lovett's OST for The Wind, I knocked out and polished a pretty fantastic opening paragraph yesterday, so I am excited!

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Playlist from 5/10:

Black Sabbath - Master of Reality
Black Sabbath - Eponymous
The Black Queen - Infinite Games
Lovett - The Wind OST
Thought Gang - Eponymous
Vanessa Williams - Dreaming' (Single)

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Card of the day:

Feels good, the sturdy symmetry of the Threes. Feels like where I'm standing right now. Of course, from Three you inevitably have to move to Four, which is a little less stable, but I'll enjoy the feeling of having both feet firmly on the ground for the moment.